Billed as a “messaging app for teams”, most businesses use Slack to facilitate real time communication. It’s basically a chat room, but a professional one, depending on your usage. Slack is a popular app for those who work in a virtual office space because it provides that near-instant connection that’s lost with email.

But what if you take the beauty of Slack’s synchronous communication and apply it to your customer service strategy?

The well-known benefits of using Slack are also the reasons why it will improve your customer service. In this post, we’ll look at several ingenious ways you can use Slack to improve your customer service. Let’s get started.

Looking for additional Slack resources? Here’s a starter list of resources to help you incorporate Slack into your customer service.

How to Use Slack to Improve Your Customer Service

For Internal Use

Before we dive into using Slack for your direct customer facing interactions, let’s talk about how to use it internally.

Get Notifications

This is one of my favorite uses for Slack. You can get real-time notifications about your customers directly in Slack. For example, if your customer’s credit card on file has declined, you can get a head’s up in Slack immediately. This will allow you to follow up right away with an email or a phone call or even a message on Slack (more on that in the second half of this post).

Embrace integrations. They make Slack a lot more flexible and useful to your business’ unique needs.

Create a Searchable Knowledgebase

Slack is searchable. Unlike emails that are notoriously difficult to search through, Slack’s search function is swift and pain-free.

You can upload or link to key assets and resources in the relevant Slack channel. Then, your team can search through Slack to find these resources without the mind numbing hassle of sifting through the inbox or trying to search for it within your knowledge base. While some team members may like the latter options, it’s always good to provide multiple ways to access the same information.

Plus, Slack provides a way to stay updated on new procedures that may not yet be canonized in your internal resource center.

For example, let’s say you and the team have just come up with a new, crowdsourced policy that must be enacted immediately. With Slack, your team has immediate and complete access to the new procedure, along with any questions or input from others on the team.

Share Resources

Slack allows teams to share resources directly through the app. If you’d like to send work-in-progress images, PDF files, Google Docs (or more) through Slack, you can. Simply drag and drop or link to the file’s web address. You and your team can use Slack to search for these resources whenever necessary.

Being able to share and then search for resources on Slack improves your customer service because it enables your team members to get the help that they need faster.

Automatically Assign Coverage

Customer support is another leg of customer service. You want your customers to get help as soon as possible. Slack allows you to get customers the help they need right away.

When support tickets come through, set up Slack to automatically ping the right user instead of letting the ticket sit in a general support inbox.

Foster a Sense of Corporation and True Team Work

This excellent post written by Lauren Ulmer describes an ingenious way to use Slack. Borrow this idea for your own business. Before launching a product, create an agent AMA (ask me anything). Here, your agents pretend to be customers and ask any product-related question that they can anticipate a customer will ask.

The brilliant part of this fun scenario is that your entire sales team will learn so much more about your product, including aspects that they may never have considered before.

For Outgoing Efforts

Now that we’ve discussed ways you can use Slack internally with your team, let’s look at customer-facing ideas.

Slack is particularly useful for business to business efforts. If you have one contact for each business, it’s easy to forego email and communicate via a Slack channel. It gets trickier if you operate as business to customer, because that could translate to quite a few Slack channels. The idea here is to improve your customer service for your customer and your team, not to make it more of a headache.

Assign Dedicated Channels

If you do work with business to business, consider creating a dedicated and private Slack channel for each account.

You can then invite that business’ key contact to communicate with you on Slack. But you don’t have to isolate it to just one business contact, you can invite all key stakeholders to communicate with you on Slack. This is especially awesome if you have to coordinate with more than one individual at that business.

Depending on your plan, Slack allows you to create an entire backlog of your conversations, without the clutter of the inbox. Both you and your customer can see what was said, who said it, and when. That’s without having to dig through emails and the trash folder to piece together what may have been discussed months ago.

Communicate Synchronously

Another customer-facing benefit of using Slack is that you can communicate with customers almost instantly (minus slow typing). As discussed in the point above, you can use Slack as a customer chat channel where multiple people can communicate without it feeling noisy.

Customers like getting immediate access to companies, especially if they have a pressing concern. This may not be a service you’ll offer to every customer– only the ones who pay a premium for such access.

Provide Quick Response

Piggybacking off of the last point, if you offer Slack to your customers, the expectation is that you’ll respond almost immediately without them having to submit an email and then wait forever for a response. Make it happen.

Provide real time response to customers. If you can’t answer immediately (which may be unrealistic depending on the number of customers you have on Slack), at least answer within 60 minutes. You can also incorporate a chatbot for certain automated notifications that may not require human input.

It’s also best to assign to one member of your team to each account (or maybe two). This allows you to minimize confusion about who needs to respond whenever a customer leaves a query.

Be sure to post office hours within the Slack channel’s “Add a topic” section. (You’ll find this option at the top of the Slack channel.) Stick to these hours. Consistency is key.

Personalize Your Interactions

It’s so easy to copy and paste responses to common questions, but people can smell canned answers a mile away. Don’t forget to add personality to your Slack interactions. Create personalized answers to customer queries.

Simple tricks like using the customer’s first name or referring to something discussed in a previous conversation can make your communication feel a lot more personal and caring.

Use Slack to Create a Community

Last but not least, use Slack to build your community. Your customers can also provide support to fellow customers. Consider hosting a community channel where customers can ask and answers questions after hours, on weekends, or whenever. Not only will this relieve some of the burden off of your team’s shoulders, it will also create a stronger sense of community for your customers.

Additional Resources

Before you go, be sure to download our starter list of resources below.

Don’t forget to download this starter list of Slack for customer service resources.

If you search for ways to market your SaaS, you’ll see the same piece of advice over and over: Understand your customer.

It’s good advice, but many SaaS founders never take it to heart. They figure “I know who I’m selling to. I’ve got this covered.” Unfortunately, few have actually put in the work.

The first step to truly understanding your customer is to create a customer profile.

A customer profile is a group of information that represents typical customers. Profiles are sometimes called “personas.” They are used to consolidate learning and help you understand who you’re selling to. They should exist as a fluid, living document that is referenced and adjusted over time.

Depending on your type of business, you may have one customer profile or many. Niche products have one or two profiles. Versatile products could have five or ten profiles. (If you find yourself creating dozens of customer profiles, you’re probably drilling down too deep.)

Customer profiles are generated from research, either through analytical data or customer interviews. Often a profile is given a human name that aligns with the customer it represents. This helps the profiles feel like real customers the company wants to attract and retain.

The profile should include the following information:

Demographical data (age, sex, location, income, etc.)

Business data (role in company, revenue, company size, etc.)

Challenges and problems

Likes and dislikes

Why they would want to use your product

Their personal and professional goals

What challenges they would have with the product

Any language/messaging that would help them see value in the product

How to get them to realize value in the product quickly

Your profile can include any other information you think would be valuable to have on hand.

But why do we create customer profiles in the first place? How do they help you run and grow your business?

Why You Need to Create Customer Profiles

Customer profiles make communication easier

Why is it easier to talk to your friends than strangers? It’s because you have common ground. You know what they like. You know which topics to avoid. You know which words are appropriate for your relationship.

With strangers, you’re searching in the dark. Each conversation is an attempt to learn, not an attempt to add value. Plus, you have to be careful that you don’t offend or disappoint, which erodes the quality of the conversation.

A customer profile helps you understand the customer so you can have a meaningful relationship. You’ll be able to push through that stranger phase quickly, even during the first interaction with the customer.

“The better you know your audience, the more effectively you can create appealing content ideas, make formats decisions, handle positioning and placement, and promote the content,” says Jayson DeMers, an online marketing expert.

Most importantly, a profile puts all of your knowledge about the customer in an easy-to-access place so your whole organization can benefit from the learning. When the new employee needs to create a customer-facing document or get on the phone with a customer, they can examine the profile so they can engage with the customer smartly.

Customer profiles create a better product

Building the best product means arming yourself with as much information as possible. You need to know what your customers want and how they want it.

You can get a lot of information from your analytics, but at some point, you’ll have to gather qualitative data from your customers. Whether you do that through surveys delivered through your application or by actually calling customers on the phone, you need that data as often as you can get it.

Through these interactions, you’ll initially create and develop your customer profiles. As the profiles become more sophisticated, you’ll have more information you can use to improve your product. Each note is a potential insight that can lead you to develop a better product.

Customer profiles create loyalty

Customers who maintain strong relationships with brands are less likely to turn to competitors, even if those competitors offer an objectively better service.

By using the right messaging, offering the right pricing, delivering the right offers, and creating a product your customers want, you’ll develop a relationship that gets harder and harder to break over time. Eventually, your product will become so ubiquitous to them that they’ll stop investigating competitors all together.

Customer profiles let you segment your marketing

In many cases, businesses have multiple customer groups that require different marketing, pricing, or messaging. If you’re one of those businesses, you’ll need a customer profile for each segment. In some cases, you could need many customer profiles.

For example, a website for a college would have different types of traffic. Current students, prospective students, parents of students, alumni, faculty, and investors would all use their site, so the college would be smart to consider each group with a customer profile. The school could even go deeper with profiles for different types of faculty (maintenance, administrators, teachers, etc.) and students at different progression levels.

In the case of a SaaS product, you might segment your customers by company size, role in the company, or any other variable that seems reasonable. Once you understand your segments (and the differences between them), you can tailor the messaging to match. For example, you would only send tips via email for enterprise features to your enterprise customers.

Customer profiles bring in more customers

This is really the biggest benefit of creating customer profiles. More customers means more revenue and more profit.

When you know what your ideal customer looks like, you can bring in new ones in three ways.

1. You can go to the places your customers spend time.

If they use a specific forum, you should participate on the forum. If they read a particular blog, you should contribute to that blog. If they follow someone influential on Twitter, you should connect with that influencer and get them to promote you.

Furthermore, understanding your customer makes cold pitching easier. There’s no reason to spend time or resources pitching your product to customers who will never buy. Instead, you can cut out the leads that will never turn into revenue and spend your time focusing on the ones that will.

2. You can attract new customers quickly.

Once new customers become aware of your product, they’ll quickly move through their decision-making process. Your customer profile has given you the knowledge to remove their barriers.

For example, if your customer research shows that your customers are willing to spend about $100/month for a product like yours, you can make pricing a non-issue for new customers.

3. Well-fit customers are more likely to refer you to new customers.

People who like your product are more likely to refer you to their friends and colleagues. Your goal is to find the customers who fit your product the best so they’ll do the selling for you. If you focus on only the best customers for your product, you’ll create an ongoing loop of referrals that scales quickly.

Final thoughts

In short, you need customer profiles because they help you grow your SaaS. They indirectly support all of your growth goals and marketing tactics. Without them, you’ll lack the proper tools to communicate with your customers effectively, and after all, marketing is just communication.

]]>Have You Already Sewn the Seeds of Churn?http://blog.stunning.co/have-you-already-sewn-the-seeds-of-churn/
Mon, 02 Jan 2017 12:00:37 +0000http://blog.stunning.co/?p=1134The signs that churn could be a problem are often there early for SaaS — have you identified any of these factors?

SaaS growth specialist Lincoln Murphy has always maintained that “the seeds of churn are sown early” in any SaaS, which, from what we’ve observed, is absolutely true. Most customers who leave don’t do so on a whim, they’ve had a poor experience or a series of experiences that didn’t meet up with their expectations and have decided to finally hit “cancel.”

So what makes a SaaS a “miss” for customers? Why are some wildly successful and others dead or “re-iterating” within a year? Here are where the seeds of churn get sewn…

Have You Already Sewn the Seeds of Churn?

Your Product Doesn’t Deliver

To be fair, if you know what you’re doing, this is probably the least likely situation, however it does happen. If your product doesn’t reach certain standards or expectations of customers, you’ve probably lost them before their free trial is even over.

Some of the usual causes behind this include:

Lack of testing and research among your target audience.

Failure to define a clear target audience in the first place.

Poor UX design inhibits the customer experience.

Your app is frustrating to use. Customers expect that an app will make something easier, not create extra steps for them.

Your app just doesn’t solve a clear problem, or doesn’t do so in a way valued by the customer.

The customer can’t see any difference between what you’re doing and other, more established competitors.

Poor overall experience

A presentation from Preact shows common reasons for churn below — as you can see “product underperforms” is still at a rather high 19.5%. While you won’t always hit a winner immediately, you can avoid being part of this statistic by spending enough time on thorough research and development before releasing your product. First impressions have a lot to answer for, which is why you will see some SaaS come back with a completely new name and branding.

It’s a “Miss” on Perceived Value

This is really another part of “product underperforms” and a lack of good research before releasing it. The value of a SaaS product is in the eyes of the beholder — if they can’t perceive value from your product, it’ll be dead in the water.

What does “value” mean? Getting back to Lincoln Murphy, he links value to the customer as being defined by their own desired outcomes of the product. Granted, these may look slightly different for varying customers, but there are often similar trends and a similar path of success milestones — steps which are vital for the customer to take in reaching those outcomes.

So, if the customer will perceive value based on achieving their own desired outcomes, it is the role of the SaaS to ensure that they smooth the path as much as possible for them to get there. You may have already sewn the seeds of churn if you’ve blithely released a product before giving any consideration to the customer journey and success milestones they must reach. Customers may perceive value anyway, but it’s always better if you’ve planned and accounted for ways to deliver it.

As pointed out in the Sixteen Ventures diagram below, “appropriate experience” is a large component of delivering the desired outcome, so this must be a consideration for SaaS.

Too Slow on “First Value Delivered”

How many of us sign onto a new app or service and are happy to cruise along waiting for a “win” from our decision? For most people, the answer is “I want it all, I want it now” (cue the popular Queen song).

For SaaS, this means that you need to be able to deliver quick wins which keep the customer happy and try to shorten the amount of time it takes for them to see the very first value delivered. This does take some planning on your part and admittedly, a “quick win” might look different for any given segment of your customer base, the point is that you need to discover what these are and make a point of delivering on them as early as possible.

Poor Onboarding

Your onboarding experience plays a vital role in whether or not customers want to stick around with your SaaS. A “bad” onboarding experience might occur when you haven’t put enough planning into it, particularly around getting the customer to that “first value delivered.”

Remember, “free trial” means just that — you are on trial. Onboarding fails in situations like the following:

The process itself is too complicated.

The user can’t easily find where to go, what to do or where to get help.

The user is “forced” to go through a lengthy process when they just want to get straight to using the app.

The UX for your onboarding is poor. The customer loses interest quickly or they find it clunky to use.

You haven’t mapped out the process and worked out how to quickly deliver value.

A successful onboarding experience for the customer begins with setting up the right expectations — if you haven’t done so, well, those could be seeds of churn right there. You want to avoid a disconnect between “product and packaging” in that customers come onboard expecting a certain experience due to your marketing materials but get another.

Going back to that earlier graph from Preact, “poor onboarding” was the highest category for causes of churn at 22.9%. It is absolutely vital to put time into devising a good onboarding experience prior to releasing your product — why waste time and money on marketing if you haven’t got it nailed?

Poor Customer Service

If there’s one lesson you can take from bricks and mortar retail stores, it’s that customer service is not a good area to skimp on or look to cut costs. It’s all part of that very-important “customer experience” for your user.

Here’s an example from someone we know who is about to pull the plug on a SaaS which provides them with an ecommerce platform:

“It’s like they’re not listening when I request support. I don’t spend time writing out an explanation for nothing, yet often they just completely ignore what I’ve said and provide me with what looks like a “generic” answer. I end up going back and forth trying to get my issue fixed until they finally acknowledge that how I tried to explain what I thought the problem was to them in the first place, was after all, correct. What makes it worse is that it takes so long to get a response. I have an issue NOW and it’s impacting my own customers, yet it takes two days between messages to get a result because they don’t provide any other communication option besides support tickets. I think the average time taken to resolve anything has been at least two weeks.”

There could be a few different things going wrong here, but any of them add up to annoyance for the customer. For example:

Poor staffing choices for customer service — people who are not prepared to look outside of the box.

Not enough staffing on customer support, causing backlogs in requests.

Service is not prompt enough which might cause very real problems for the customer (our ecommerce friend is losing sales, for example).

Failure to explore issues thoroughly — in this case, the customer has to do all the work.

For the sake of retaining your customers, put proper resources into customer service if you want to be around for the long term. Getting this right from early on is an important part of encouraging retention.

Take care of customer experience in your SaaS. Get our checklist here:

Final Thoughts

Have you already sewn the seeds of churn in your SaaS? If so, it’s not necessarily too late to do anything about it.

Begin with solving a clear problem and putting the time into research and development. Identify your target audience and engage them early through user testing before releasing your product.

On release, you should have developed a strong onboarding plan that seeks to help the user reach “first value” as quickly as possible. Make sure your customer service is top-notch and that the overall user experience is designed to delight.The seeds of churn are sown early, but you can remove them by putting in the right amount of effort.

]]>7 Key Elements of an Effective Dunning Emailhttp://blog.stunning.co/7-key-elements-of-an-effective-dunning-email/
Mon, 21 Nov 2016 12:00:47 +0000http://blog.stunning.co/?p=1087Dunning emails are a great way to combat churn; what does an effective email look like?

Churn is an issue of utmost concern to SaaS. The standard tends to be that your churn rate needs to be less than 5%, otherwise your SaaS could be in trouble.

After all, there’s no sense in spending a whole lot on marketing for acquisition if you’ve got a problem hanging onto customers in the long term, right?

There are a number of strategies you can put in place to combat churn, including quality onboarding processes and focusing on customer engagement, but you’ve also got to be paying attention to another common churn cause: failed credit card payments.

Credit cards may decline for a number of reasons. Perhaps the client didn’t have the funds available, but more often, you’ll find the card has expired. You can expect around 3% of your customers to have an expiring credit card each month, which could be 36% of your customers across a year. If you add in any other reasons for credit card payments failing, you’ve got quite a significant segment of your customers.

So, if you haven’t already, it’s time to do something about failed credit card payments, beginning with initiating dunning emails:

What does an effective dunning email look like? Get our template here:

7 Key Elements of an Effective Dunning Email

Dunning Emails

The term dunning comes for the word “dun”, which means to repeatedly ask debtors for payment. While this might conjure up unpleasant images of collections agencies or beefed up collectors removing furniture from a house, dunning emails shouldn’t be presented in this way to your customers.

The idea is that you should set up a series of emails, starting with pre-empting declined payments. How? Well, if the customer is a subscriber with you, their credit card details are already in your system so you can find when their card is going to expire.

The easiest way to set up these emails is with a tool which will analyze customer activity and trigger emails for you. If you happen to be a Stripe user, this is exactly what Stunning will do for you.

#1. Timing

First of all, if you’re trying to get the customer to update their credit card details before a transaction declines, generally getting in early is better. From our experience (and the same goes for dunning emails), customers often don’t respond to your first email. It’s usually from the second or third email that we see a better response.

We suggest using a good dunning software which picks up on expiring credit cards early and starts to send out email requests to update credit card information from at least one month prior to expiry.

As for the timing of your emails, whether you are sending them before or after a payment failure, you need to look for the right balance between communicating urgency and being plain annoying. We’ve found that sending three emails across the space of a week is a good place to start, but we always suggest testing to see what works best for your particular business.

#2. Return address and subject line

Next up, when you’re sending your emails, make sure you are sending from an email address which customers are able to respond to. “Do not reply” addresses can just add an extra level of frustration to the process for the customer because you haven’t made it easy for them to reply or ask any questions if they wish to do so.

As for the subject line of your email, make it clear why you are sending it so that the customer immediately knows there is a problem with their subscription. For example, your first email subject might be as simple as; [SaaS Name] Please update your billing information.

If the customer doesn’t respond to that first email, we would usually follow up with similar subject lines, except with “second notice” or “final notice” included. We usually send out three emails, but you might decide that four or five works better for you.

Again, the subject line is something which you may like to test out to see what gets the best response. We still suggest making it clear as to the purpose of the email, but of course you can reword it to suit.

#3. Tell them what happened

There’s no sense in fluffing around — get straight to the point and explain to the customer what happened that is causing you to write to them. For example:

“Hi George,

We just tried to charge your credit card for your subscription renewal at [SaaS Name], however it failed due to [reason].”

Simple and free of fluff. There is no need to pander or sound like you’re wheedling.

#4. Explain next steps

Every email you send out to customers should have some kind of clear call to action, and your dunning emails are no different. After telling them about their declined payment, give them a clear path to update their credit card details. For example:

“To keep your account active, we need current credit card information. Please update your credit card details by clicking here [insert link], within the next 7 days. Your account will be automatically cancelled after 7 days if payment details are not updated.”

There are a couple of important points here which you should include with explaining those next steps:

Give the customer a direct link within the email which doesn’t require them to login, open another window or click around looking for where they need to go to update payment details. The idea is to make it as simple as possible for them.

Give them a time limit. If you leave it wide open, you won’t convey any kind of urgency and the customer might put the task on the back-burner. Tell them how long they have before their account will be cancelled.

#5. Include value proposition

We like to try to personalize the emails we send out and remind the customer of value we have delivered to them already. It helps to keep in the minds of your customers why it is that they need you so that hopefully, they’re not hesitant to update their billing information.

For example you might say something like:

“[SaaS Name] has helped you to [specific value delivered] over the last month, so it’s important that you keep your account active to avoid any disruptions to this.”

It never hurts to remind people of the genuine value you provide them with, especially at this time where many are feeling “subscription fatigue” over the many different subscription products they probably have. It’s relatively easy for someone to do nothing about updating payment details if they don’t feel a compelling reason to keep the subscription.

#6. Increase the urgency

If the customer has not responded to your email the first time around, escalate the urgency of your tone in each email. That is not to say you should be demanding or threatening in any way (no one likes that “debt collector” image!), but you shouldn’t leave it uncertain as to how urgent it is that the customer updates their billing information.

Terms such as “second notice” or “final notice” are often enough to trigger people into action. You should also keep them aware of how much time they have, for example “your account will be cancelled in two days if payment information is not updated.”

You can keep things to the point without being unkind. Always remember that you want to keep your professional image with customers.

#7. Keep a professional tone

The words we use matter. You only have to look at the inflammatory responses banks often receive over delinquent mortgage accounts to get some examples of how not to treat customers. If you’re going to take a position that customers find threatening or unfair, the chances are they will not feel inclined to stay with you.

At the same time, coming across as begging is also not a good idea. We’ve seen emails along the lines of “please come back!” and they really do just take the tone of trying to wheedle something out of the customer.

Think about the language you use overall and what the likely response might be. For example, we prefer to say something like “we tried to charge your credit card, however it failed” rather than “your payment was declined.” It’s a subtle difference, but the second one sounds a bit more like you’re accusing the customer of something, whereas the first one is simply saying the card failed.

Final Thoughts

Staying on top of churn in your SaaS is not always easy, but you can stay ahead of the game if you implement a strategy for dunning. Credit card payment declines tend to represent a significant proportion of SaaS customers, so they are worth pursuing.

Use a good dunning software to set up automated emails so that you’re not having to manually look for upcoming credit card expiries or look for payment declines yourself.

Following the outlined steps to send out effective dunning emails can help you to combat churn and improve your overall SaaS revenue. We’d consider this to be a “quick win” that most SaaS will see results from.

SaaS are often in the position where each customer who comes onboard is hard-won.

Of course you want to keep them, that’s why you’re monitoring for signs that they’re thinking of leaving and trying to proactively do something about them, but of course it’s even better if you can keep them from thinking about leaving in the first place.

This is where it’s important that your SaaS has thought through retention strategies from the start and has put a plan in place. What can you be doing to keep people interested?

4 Customer Retention Strategies For SaaS

#1. Your Value Proposition

A big part of retention is ensuring you’ve attracted the right customers in the first place. As Lincoln Murphy says;

“Good customers come from properly targeting and bringing the right audience to your marketing website or otherwise getting in front of them to sell ’em your stuff.”

Part of retaining customers is not simply scrambling when they appear to be in pre-churn status, it’s how you manage them across the entire customer lifecycle, starting from before they sign up.

How clear are you?

You should be collecting churn data and figuring out the reasons why people are leaving; how many are related to not being a good fit in the first place? One of the ways you end up with “poor fit” customers is by not having a clear value proposition to begin with.

Your customers should understand the answers to the following questions even before they sign up:

What particular problem/s do you solve?

Who do you solve them for?

What makes you better than any competitors?

You should be clear on the answers to these questions too, as well as an overall: why are we in business? There has to be a good reason, right? Why would you create a SaaS if it was just like someone else’s?

These ideas should be clear in the content you produce, in any emails a prospect might receive before signing up and in your website copy.

A good strategy is also to come up with a snappy value proposition statement which sums up your business and will interest prospects to look further. Check out Slack’s value proposition statement below:

Slack actually keeps it interesting; their base statement is “a messaging app for teams”, but every so often they will change out the kind of team they are talking about based on a current customer.

Just remember a key point here: getting the right customers happens when you are clearly able to explain the value they stand to gain from going with you.

#2. Onboarding Process

The experience the customer has with you during onboarding is crucial. Your aim is to ensure that they realize the value for which they signed up in the first place. What does success look like to them? Give them an onboarding process which invariably leads them in the right direction.

For example, Slack users will have noticed their low-touch method for onboarding new customers and ensuring they know what to do, where and how. Useronboard wrote a great piece directing people through Slack’s onboarding a couple of years ago and not a lot has changed.

Slack takes the opportunity to give people a “tour” through setup and how to use it, followed by new users being able to chat with Slackbot to finish their setup. It’s a great example of what you can do to create a good onboarding experience, but make it low-touch so you don’t need to have people on the phone with your customers talking them through.

It’s a big consideration when launching a SaaS really—what are you going to do to make onboarding easy?

Another great point to remember about onboarding was discussed in this TechCrunch article. What is your “empty state” like? Is it intuitive for users to know what to do?

“Empty state” in this case refers to the appearance of your app when a user has first signed up and has not had the chance to use it or create their own data. For example, if you look at the Slack screen shot above, would you know what to do if you were greeted with nothing but the left-hand menu and a blank screen in the middle?

As they say, a useful empty state tells you what it’s for, why you’re seeing it and how you can fill it up. This is something for your UX considerations really, what can you do to make customer life easier?

Value, value, value

One of the key things your onboarding process must do is demonstrate that value which you promised the customer before they signed up. You should ensure that you are honoring any promises made prior to signup so there are no surprises (of the bad kind) for the customer.

Just being as useful as you can on a regular basis is also a great idea. Sending out regular emails and having a posting schedule for social media should be a given, but you can’t always be in promotional mode with those or you’ll likely make customers wary.

Create content which you know your customers will want (just ask them if you’re not sure!) For example, you could create “how-to” guides, videos or slideshares. You could write blog posts, create “quick tip” images or create a knowledge base.

Just keep it relevant. If you’ve got content which really only applies to a certain customer segment, email it to the people within that segment. Train your customers to expect quality content which applies to them!

#4. Optimize for “Aha”

What?! What is “aha”? Well, if you check out the story behind Twitter and how Josh Elman helped them “growth hack” to avoid so many zombie accounts, the “aha” is that action by a user which makes them more likely to continue as a customer.

Here’s what happened for Twitter:

“It turned out that if you manually selected and followed at least 5-10 Twitter accounts in your first day on Twitter, you were much more likely to become a long term user, since you had chosen things that interested you. And if we helped someone you know follow you back, then even better. As we kept tweaking the features to focus on helping users achieve these things, our retention dramatically rose.”

If you have signed up for Twitter more recently, you’ve probably noticed they help you find accounts to follow which will be of interest to you.

Have you discovered what the “aha” is for your SaaS customers? Have you optimized to better improve their chances of getting there?

Final Thoughts

Optimizing your SaaS for retention is an opportunity which every SaaS should take. You work hard enough to get customers onboard, so it makes sense to have a plan for keeping them!

There are many strategies you can use (in fact, there are entire onboarding handbooks out there!), but we wanted to look at a few important strategies which all can use.

Attracting the right sorts of customers in the first place is a key concern for retention. Develop a clear value proposition and deliver on it. Have a thorough onboarding process, effective engagement strategies and know and optimize for your “aha.”

It takes a bit of testing, but if you’ve developed a good product, these strategies should boost your retention.

Did you know that Stunning was actually born out of founder Richard Felix being a Stripe user?

When he began using Stripe for the payment system on Are My Sites Up?, he found that he needed to write code to set up lifecycle emails for his SaaS app. Hence other SaaS apps using Stripe can now use that code with the Stunning app.

Fortunately for SaaS, there are a bunch of apps available that integrate nicely with Stripe and can help you to boost your customer retention. We’re taking a look at a few here.

Integrate other business functions with Stripe for better efficiency. Grab our free guide.

Stripe User? These Apps Help Boost Customer Retention

Analytics

By now, you’re probably well aware of the importance of monitoring your analytics; “what gets measured, gets managed.” There are a few good analytics apps for Stripe available out there that will help you to better understand your customers and monitor retention efforts.

Here are a couple which work well…

Control

This app is great for SaaS but is also suited to ecommerce or other transactional businesses. They offer desktop, iPhone and Android apps so you can keep track of notifications, set up payments or analyze data while on the go.

A particularly helpful feature that will assist your retention efforts is that they enable you to segment customers based on their behaviors with you. This helps you to identify high-value clients as well as those who are at-risk and should be targeted for re-engagement or retention efforts.

You are also able to create and save filters so that you can easily identify customers who belong to various segments, for example if you want to look at revenue specifically from one country or currency.

First Officer

First Officer is an analytics app designed specifically for SaaS. Their key pillar is “no fluff” data, so they aim to avoid any vanity metrics and ensure you only get data that really matters. They provide one-click access to strategic insights.

With First Officer you can get a better understanding of important metrics such as monthly recurring revenue and customer lifetime value.

On the retention side, you are able to get a clear picture of churn rates as well as produce cohort retention charts to better analyze your customer base. These will give you a very good idea of segments you need to be reaching out to and engaging better with.

CRM

Every SaaS needs a good CRM software to analyse, monitor and store customer information, but if you’re a Stripe user, it’s even more helpful if it will integrate and pull through Stripe data. Some of the major CRM platforms don’t actually have a direct Stripe integration, though you can get around them with recipes from Zapier or IFTTT.

If you’re already set on your CRM and it doesn’t have a specific Stripe integration, you may want to look at Zapier or IFTTT for a solution, but otherwise, here is a CRM platform that already integrates with Stripe:

Agile

Agile is designed not only for SaaS, but for small businesses and ecommerce stores too. Features for SaaS include some cool functions like being able to monitor what the customer is doing in your app and send automated emails based on user behavior.

Another feature their clients love is that you can create custom pop-ups based on the stage the customer is at with your SaaS. These can help create guided tours and onboard them faster—we all know that being able to demonstrate the value of your features helps with retention!

Dunning

Dunning is the process of communicating with customers and keeping them updated with any payment issues such as expired credit cards or declined payments. This is an important process if you want to retain customers, but arguably, pre-dunning activities are even more important.

Pre-dunning means that you stay on top of potential payment issues before they happen. This would mean letting customers know before a credit card reaches expiry date, or any other potential churn events such as the expiration of a trial.

Stunning

Yep, we may be a little biased, but Stunning has been built by Stripe-using SaaS owners, for Stripe-using SaaS owners. We understand well the issues that SaaS have with payments and retention and have designed a system to automate as many of those pain points as possible.

Besides the dunning and pre-dunning features mentioned above, Stunning allows you to send a whole range of automated emails for different customer events and stages. For example, you can remind them when they are about to be charged for an upgrade to the next tier and welcome emails when they sign on.

Stunning has helped customers recover more than $225,729,550 so far with clever features such as smart retries on payments and payment update pages, which make it simple for customers to click straight through and update payment details.

Paying In Installments

You may strike a situation where a customer wants an expensive or enterprise version of what you offer, but wants to pay in installments. If they match your “ideal customer” for your SaaS, you may want to give them that option in order to retain the business. (This is by no means a suggestion to do so—obviously upfront payment is the most ideal!).

Most of the time, this will be more applicable to non-SaaS goods and services, but from time to time, SaaS want this option too. Being able to allow the customer some payment flexibility like this may be the difference between them going with you or someone else.

Splitit

Splitit is designed to integrate with Stripe and offer the option of paying in installments. Pretty simple really; they automatically debit the installments and work via your Stripe gateway until the payment plan has finished.

Mobile Payments

How often does your SaaS get out and about to promote your services? We know the very nature of SaaS means a tendency to communicate digitally, but meeting actual humans in-person can be a powerful way to build your client base and retain those you already have.

If you get out to trade shows, conferences or expos, you may want a simple means to gather signups and payment via mobile (of course, depending on the structure of your SaaS). This is where an app to accept mobile payments which integrates with your Stripe system can be very useful.

We mentioned Control earlier for analytics, but another feature of theirs is the ability to accept payments via their iPhone or Android mobile apps. You could try them out or something like:

Payment For Stripe

Simple really, Payment For Stripe works via iOS or Android and allows you to collect payments in-person via Stripe. It’s very simple to use and set up, and charges a 1% per transaction fee rather than any monthly fees.

Referrals Or Rewards

Having a mechanism to allow customers to make referrals and earn rewards is a great way to boost visibility and growth as well as generate loyalty among current clients. If your SaaS is going to use this as a retention technique, you’ll want some decent tools to help you get the job done.

Previously we’ve looked at ReferralSaaSquatch (which is built specifically for SaaS) and Ambassador, but here is another option:

Refersion

Create your own referral program with Refersion. SaaS can grab their pixel for tracking affiliate orders and integrate onto your site. You are able to make it entirely your own by customizing the look and how the program works. Additionally, you can select from multiple payout options and separate partner accounts.

Integrate other business functions with Stripe for better efficiency. Grab our free guide.

]]>Should Your SaaS Be Picking Up The Phone?http://blog.stunning.co/should-your-saas-be-picking-up-the-phone/
Mon, 29 Feb 2016 13:00:22 +0000http://blog.stunning.co/?p=810Many SaaS avoid implementing phone support, but is this something you should be doing?

One major opportunity for differentiation among SaaS lies in how well you provide customer support. In fact, your customer support may be one of the most influential factors to drive how well you retain customers and keep churn rates low.

Many SaaS, including some very large, well-financed ones, still seem reluctant to provide much in the way of phone support. Whether it’s because they don’t want to put the staffing and infrastructure in place or simply because they want to be available, but not that available, they are potentially missing a good opportunity to delight their customers.

Should your SaaS be picking up the phone? We’re taking a look.

During Your Onboarding

Most SaaS have an onboarding process that goes something like this: customer is introduced to SaaS via some marketing method, customer signs up for free trial, customer receives a few emails or training tips, customer finishes trial and they either stay or go.

For the most part, the whole process is very low-touch in terms of genuine human interaction, and understandably so; this is how you create a scaleable system.

SaaS who are priced at the lower end and have the ability to grow rapidly without having to spend a lot of time convincing customers of the merits of their purchase may be just fine without adding in phone conversations, but there are other advantages to doing so.

Should Your SaaS be Picking Up the Phone?

Get Immediate Feedback

How do you really know what your customers are thinking or how they feel about your product? You can ask them to answer a survey or to send you a message with any feedback, but often those methods that don’t require immediate action get ignored or forgotten.

A phone conversation, even if you have to limit these to your most frequent users, can be a lot more revealing. Find out exactly what users love, what they think could be improved and how they found your onboarding process. Do they feel they had enough information available to support their choice? Or were they confused and wondering about some things?

Help Build Trust and Awareness

If your SaaS is a bit more complicated or has any aspects to its use which will not be entirely intuitive, you could be in danger of losing new signups who don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring out how to use your product.

This is where getting on the phone is a handy tool for building awareness. You could retain a customer who otherwise would have walked simply by being there to go through it with them. You could take the opportunity to give a live demo and to answer questions they have on the spot.

The other thing with talking to someone over the phone is that it is a much more personal experience than email. If you use talented phone salespeople who have empathy toward and a knack for dealing with humans, your customer feels valued and you build their trust in your business.

The experience a customer has with your SaaS over the phone can help to convey your professionalism and long-term prospects as a solution to their needs; thus, being available on the phone may be one of your best customer strategies during the onboarding phase.

Build Ongoing Relationships

A successful SaaS is one that not only onboards plenty of new customers, but manages to keep them long-term. Retaining customers is critical to producing ongoing revenue growth, and retaining is about building a lasting relationship.

You could choose to stay in touch through other, more passive methods such as email, but nothing gives that “human” touch quite like talking to customers over the phone does. A phone conversation also allows you to be even more proactive; sometimes you’ll get customers who would otherwise silently cancel without bringing issues to your attention, whereas if you get them on the phone, you have the opportunity to take early action to resolve their issue.

Providing Ongoing Customer Support

Depending on who your customers are, there’s a good chance that many of them still actually prefer to talk on the phone. In fact, in a study of what customers prefer from support services, a Talkdesk survey found that 80% prefer to talk over the phone:

The other forms of support communication came in way behind the phone—possibly an indication that people feel more comfortable getting an issue dealt with quickly and with higher human interaction.

Most SaaS now aim to be customer-centric in their delivery; it’s a must if you want to achieve high levels of engagement and retention. So, you could look at having a phone support option as simply giving your customers what they want in order to create the best possible service experience for them.

If you’re worried about being inundated with calls or having to hire on extra staff to man the phones, consider these statistics from Insight Squared:

75% of customers think calling is the most effective way to get a quick response. If your product is the type that demands real-time answers, then providing a phone option is simply better service to your customers and meeting an expectation they probably already have.

86% of customers are willing to pay up to 25% more for a better customer experience. This means it’s possible you could get away with raising your prices slightly if you provide phone support and an overall better level of service than competitors. You could possibly even pay for that higher level of service with the revenue from a price increase.

So even if you do need to hire extra staff to cope with call volumes, there could be a pay off in that 1) you’re doing what customers want and 2) you may be able to charge more for it.

Differentiate From Competitors

The SaaS market is fiercely competitive, so to stay in business you need to look for any advantage you can get. If the standard of your customer service differentiates positively enough from your competitors, this is a good opportunity for you to gain the advantage.

Here’s another stat from the Insight Squared report: 73% of consumers say friendly customer service reps can make them fall in love with a brand. I don’t know about you, but “friendly” definitely seems to be easier to get across over the phone rather than in a live chat or email.

Using phone support methods is a great opportunity for you to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty to your brand. When those go up, so does your rate of customer retention.

Phone conversations can have the advantage of deriving satisfaction and loyalty over other methods for a few reasons as pointed out by Insight Squared:

You can better understand customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction because you can pick up on nuances such as tone, which are more difficult in methods such as live chat or email. (Only face-to-face service would be more effective for this).

The customer is more likely to feel heard over the phone and you get the opportunity to better calm down someone who is frustrated.

Do It Right Though…

If you’re going to use superior phone support as a way to genuinely deliver value to your customers and differentiate your SaaS from competitors, then it’s worth taking the time to set up the right systems.

Going back to the Talkdesk survey on preferred methods of support, notice how many people have ended up using an automated phone system (14%) versus how many would actually prefer it (5%). It’s easy to see why companies want to put in automated systems, but you run the risk of simply annoying your customers. Just try virtually any government department line if you want to understand why—no one wants to spend 5 minutes bouncing around different automated menus and then go on hold for half an hour.

Another important thing to note is that your customer service reps who answer the phones should be well-trained and empowered as far as possible to resolve issues on the spot. 72% of frustrated customers have blamed their poor service experience on having to explain their problem to multiple people.

Final Thoughts

Should your SaaS be picking up the phone? Well, studies indicate that if you can swing it, the short answer is “yes.” Augmenting your customer service activities with a phone service can provide you with an edge over competitors.

Having a phone program in place during onboarding can help to point customers in the right direction before they silently cancel. It can also help to clear queries they may have on the spot and to hold their attention, even if just to teach them something for a few minutes.

With your ongoing customer support, having a phone option is often preferred by customers, especially as they still perceive that over the phone is the quickest way to sort out any kind of urgent issue.

Phone service gives you a new opportunity to delight customers, retain their business and improve your own bottom line.

]]>Customer Service: SaaS And The Second “S”http://blog.stunning.co/customer-service-saas-and-the-second-s/
Mon, 15 Feb 2016 13:00:02 +0000http://blog.stunning.co/?p=796Every SaaS needs great software, but to be competitive you should also focus on getting the “service” part right.

What’s the state of customer service in your SaaS? If there’s one thing that no SaaS should ever lose sight of, it’s that “service” part intimated by the second “S”, yet many are giving their competitors an ‘in’ by not giving customer service the focus it requires.

This is especially prevalent in earlier stage start-ups and could foil efforts to grow rapidly by increasing churn rates. Remember, it’s usually pretty easy for a SaaS customer to hit the “cancel account” button if they’re unhappy; it’s not the same to them as larger pieces of infrastructure which have cost them more money and they tend to think twice about.

As Kissmetrics points out, it can be tempting to focus more on creating perfect software rather than the service piece, but your SaaS should remember you are not just a product – you are a service. You’re missing at least 50% of the equation if service isn’t of a high standard.

Terms you’ve probably heard of like “customer experience” and “customer success” form important parts of your full customer service strategy. If you want to build an overarching culture that puts the customer at the center, then you need to consciously implement a few strategies which serve this objective, even if you’re at an early stage.

Know Your Customer Success Milestones

“Customer Success is when your customers achieve their Desired Outcome through their interactions with your company.” Lincoln Murphy

Customer success milestones are dictated by the customer – they are about the steps involved for the customer to achieve their desired outcome/s from your product. This means that the product itself is not the center of service, the customer is. As Lincoln Murphy further states, for the customer, the desired outcome is the sum of their required outcome plus an appropriate experience.

Sure, your SaaS has product-based desired outcomes which probably involve goals like convincing customers to upgrade to your next tier, but the idea is that if you focus on helping the customer achieve their desired outcome, then you’ll more than likely achieve your goals too.

Identifying your customer success milestones also means that you’re able to assess them and proactively look for and resolve any gaps which impact on customer experience.

What essential customer support features do you need? Check out our free guide here.

5 Essential Customer Support Features

What does a customer success milestone look like?

So if customer success milestones are about achieving the customer’s desired outcome, what are some examples of what they might be? As explained in Sixteen Ventures, customer-centric milestones sit alongside the product-based milestones which get them there.

Your first step is to understand what success looks like to your customer (ask them what their goals are for your product if you’re not sure). For example, success in the customer’s eyes could be: “my entire invoicing system is automated” or “I reduce customer churn by X%” – figure out what that looks like for your SaaS.

From there you can map out the milestones to get there from the customer perspective. Here is an example for an e-commerce store-builder from Sixteen Ventures:

Appropriate Experience

The experience the customer has along the way to achieving those success milestones is really the “secret sauce” which either delivers or doesn’t deliver a desired outcome. They might create that online store and even be making sales, but if the process to achieve those milestones was difficult or unpleasant in any way, they haven’t received their ultimate desired outcome.

You could have the best list of features ever, but they’re of no value to the customer if your SaaS isn’t actively supporting them with information on making use of the functionality and what benefits it will have for them. To do this successfully, you need to be proactive at each stage of the customer journey.

The following sections look at some strategies for providing your customers with that appropriate experience throughout their journey.

Have Documented Standards

Assuming you’ve already hired people with a high level of customer-facing skills (perhaps along with technical skills if you’re a small, early-stage startup), make sure that you have set and documented customer interaction standards.

As customer service consultant Micah Solomon says, even if your team has the best customer-facing aptitude in the world, they need guidelines based on the best-practices of world-class customer-centric companies. Don’t leave them to muddle through on their own – this could lead to inconsistent experiences for customers. Ideally you want to know that the same customer can call back, get a different team member but still have an excellent experience and be given information consistent with what the last person told them.

Get Everyone Involved

Your organizational chart

Putting the customer at the center of your business involves everyone, including those in roles not traditionally “customer facing.” Some SaaS have successfully done this by rearranging their organizational charts so that they are more customer-driven.

For example, Outright (now GoDaddy bookkeeping) aligned theirs with different stages of the customer journey, with dedicated teams, including developers, product managers and designers for each stage. This way they are acknowledging that a new user will need different ways to get value from the product than an established user and they can be more focused on meeting the needs of each stage.

Rotate everyone through customer support

If you have a slightly larger team, it can be tricky to ensure that “back-office” roles don’t lose touch with the customer. Many organizations (SaaS or otherwise) work to keep the customer front-of-mind in all team members by rotating them through the customer support function.

Team members don’t necessarily all directly talk with customers (especially if this is not one of their strengths), but sitting and listening in for a couple of hours every quarter is also a good way to ensure they don’t lose touch.

Offer Quality Self-Service Options

Ideally, if a customer wants to know how to use something or has a question about your product, they should be able to easily find answers themselves. Most don’t want to have to contact you about it, especially if it’s something that could easily be dealt with in training materials or on an FAQ page.

Self-service options could involve offering free trials, demonstration videos, other training modes such as email courses and blog posts, or putting an FAQ page up on your website. “If it’s something customers are likely to ask about, either fix it so there’s no question to ask next time or make the answer easy to find without having to contact you.” (Micah Solomon)

Be There

It’s a basic of customer service really, yet in the busy environment of an early SaaS, always making yourself available should the customer call on you is often overlooked. Prioritize building relationships with your customers and be prepared to drop everything to serve them if they call.

Include minimum service standards in your documented customer service procedures which state how quickly customers should be responded to on the phone, by email, on live chat or by any other method you use. It may be a hustle, especially if you are a young company, but customers will reward you for being available to them and building a strong relationship with them.

What essential customer support features do you need? Check out our free guide here.

Final Thoughts

If you want your SaaS to be successful, you should always prioritize customer service at least as much as building a quality software product.

Know your ideal customer well; build out profiles of what that customer looks like, understand their desired outcomes and map out the success milestones they need in order to get there.

All along their journey, your customers should be met with outstanding support and feel like they are genuinely a priority of yours. Make it easy for them to ask and receive help, but also to find answers for themselves.